To prevent electronic equipment from over heating, there are many existing methods to help control thermal management. The simplest is allowing abundant airflow through a card chassis to cool electronic cards directly by convection. In environments where convection is impossible or impractical, individual cards may be built on a thermally conductive frame so that heat is conducted away from the card components to the enclosing chassis. In extreme cases of thermal management, spray cooling may be used to bathe circuit cards directly in a liquid coolant. In some systems, a heat sink or liquid-cooled heat exchanger is attached directly to the body of the electronic component that generates the heat.
Electronics assemblies must overcome the increasing challenge of heat rejection and thermal management. COTS (commercial off the shelf) computer processors and circuit cards offer ever-increasing levels of processing power, but require correspondingly larger power inputs and produce more heat. It is becoming increasingly difficult to properly cool these cards, especially in compact installations or in adverse environment. It is desirable to use COTS circuit cards that often lack the physical ruggedization required for use in a military environment as well as manage the thermal challenges of modern equipment.